In 1763, he read a paper before the Royal Society, on the "Effects of a Blow on the Heart," which was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the year. And, in 1764 he established his character as a medical writer by an elegant and elaborate treatise on "The Dysentery," still, we believe, consulted for its information, and studied for the purity and precision of its Latin style. About this time, too, he commenced a recasting of his "Pleasures of Imagination," which he did not live to finish; and in which, on the whole, there is more of laborious alteration than of felicitous improvement. In 1766, Warburton, his old foe, who had now been made a bishop, reprinted, in a new edition of his "Divine Legation of Moses," his attack on Akenside's notions about ridicule, without deigning to take any notice of the explanations he had given in his reply. This renewal of hostilities, coming, especially as it did, from the vantage ground of the Episcopal bench, enraged our poet, and, by way of rejoinder, he issued a lyrical satire which he had had lying past him in pickle for fifteen years, and which nothing but a fresh provocation would have induced him to publish. It was entitled "An Ode to the late Thomas Edwards, Esq." Edwards had opposed Warburton ably in a book entitled "Canons of Criticism," and was himself a poet. The real sting of this attack lay in Akenside's production of a letter from Warburton to Concanen, dated 2d January 1726, which had fallen accidentally into the hands of our poet; and in which Warburton had accused Addison of plagiarism, and said that when "Pope borrows it is from want of genius." Concanen was one of the "Dunces," and it was, of course, Akenside's purpose to shew Warburton's inconsistency in the different opinions he had expressed at different times of them and of their great adversary. We know not if the sturdy bishop took any notice of this ode. Even his Briarean arms were sometimes too full of the controversial work which his overbearing temper and fierce passions were constantly giving him.
In 1766, Akenside received the thanks of the College of Physicians for an edition of Harvey's works, which he prepared for the press, and to which he had prefixed a preface. In June 1767 he read before the College two papers, one on "Cancers and Asthmas," and the other on "White Swelling of the Joints," both of which were published the next year in the first volume of the Medical Transactions. In the same year, one Archibald Campbell, a Scotchman, a purser in the navy, and called, from his ungainly countenance, "horrible Campbell," produced a small jeu d'esprit, entitled "Lexiphanes, imitated from Lucian, and suited to the present times," in which he tries to ridicule Johnson's prose and Akenside's poetry. His object was probably to attract their notice, but both passed over this grin of the "Grim Feature" in silent contempt. Akenside was still busy with the revisal of his poem, had finished two books, "made considerable progress with the third, and written a fragment of the fourth;" but death stepped in and blighted his prospects, both as a physician, with increasing practice and reputation, and as a poet, whose favourite work was approaching what he deemed perfection. He was seized with putrid fever; and, after a short illness, died on the 23 d June 1770 at an age when many men are in their very prime, both of body and mind—that of 49. He died in his house in Burlington Street, and was buried on the 28th in St. James's Church.
Akenside had been, notwithstanding his many acquaintances and friends, on the whole, a lonely man; without domestic connexions, and having, so far as we are informed, either no surviving relations or no intercourse with those who might be still alive. He was not especially loved in society; he wanted humour and good-humour both, and had little of that frank cordiality which, according to Sidney Smith, "warms and cheers more than meat or wine." He had far less geniality than genius. Yet, in certain select circles, his mind, which was richly stored with all knowledge, opened delightfully, and men felt that he was the author of his splendid poem. One of his biographers gives him the palm for learning, next to Ben Jonson, Milton, and Gray (he might perhaps have also excepted Landor and Coleridge), over all our English poets.
In 1772, Mr. Dyson published an edition of his friend's poems, containing the original form of the "Pleasures of Imagination," as well as its half-finished second shape; his "Odes," "Inscriptions," "Hymn to the Naiads," etc., omitting, however, his poem to Curio in its first and best version, and some of his smaller pieces. This edition, too, contained an account of Akenside's life by his friend, so short and so cold as either to say little for Dyson's heart, or a great deal for his modesty and reticence. His uniform and munificent kindness to the poet during his lifetime, however, determines us in favour of the latter side of the alternative.
Of Akenside, as a man, our previous remarks have perhaps indicated our opinion. He was rather a scholar somewhat out of his element, and unreconciled to the world, than a thorough gentleman; irritable, vehement, and proud—his finer traits were only known to his intimates, who probably felt that in Wordsworth's words,
"You must love him ere to you
He doth, seem worthy of your love."
In religion his opinions seem to have been rather unsettled; but, of whatever doubts he had, he gave the benefit latterly to the Christian side—at least he was ever ready to rebuke noisy and dogmatic infidelity. It is said that he intended to have included the doctrine of immortality in his later version of the "Pleasures of Imagination"—and even as the poem is, it contains some transient allusions to that great object of human hope, although none, it must be admitted, to its special Christian grounds.
We have now a very few sentences to enounce about his poetry, or, more properly speaking, about his two or three good poems, for we must dismiss the most of his odes, in their deep-sounding dulness, as nearly unworthy of their author's genius. Up to the days of Keats' "Endymion" and "Hyperion," Akenside's "Hymn to the Naiads" was thought one of the best attempts to reproduce the classical spirit and ideas. It now takes a secondary place; and at no time could be compared to an actual hymn of Callimachus or Pindar, any more than Smollett's "Supper after the Manner of the Ancients" was equal to a real Roman Coena, the ideal of which Croly has so superbly described in "Salathiel." His "Epistle to Curio" is a masterpiece of vigorous composition, terse sentiment, and glowing invective. It gathers around Pulteney as a ring of fire round the scorpion, and leaves him writhing and shrivelled. Out of Dryden and Pope, it is perhaps the best satiric piece in our poetry.
Of the "Pleasures of Imagination," it is not necessary to say a great deal. A poem that has been so widely circulated, so warmly praised, so frequently quoted and imitated—the whole of which nearly a man like Thomas Brown has quoted in the course of his lectures—must possess no ordinary merit. Its great beauty is its richness of description and language—its great fault is its obscurity; a beauty and a fault closely connected together, even as the luxuriance of a tropical forest implies intricacy, and its lavish loveliness creates a gloom. His attempt to express Plato's philosophy in blank verse is not always successful. Perhaps prose might better have answered his purpose in expressing the awfully sublime thought of the "archetypes of all things existing in God." We know that in certain objects of nature—in certain rocks, for instance (such as Coleridge describes in his "Wanderings of Cain")— there lie silent prefigurations and aboriginal types of artificial objects, such as ships, temples, and other orders of architecture; and it is so also in certain shells, woods, and even in clouds. How interesting and beautiful those painted prophecies of nature, those quiet hieroglyphics of God, those mystic letters, which, unlike those on the Babylonian wall, do not,
"Careering shake,
And blaze IMPATIENT to be read,"